Winter Kills Read Online Free PDF Page B

are you, and we wouldn’t stand for that. But even if it was a few dollars more, you’d have to say he’s a city feller and his overhead is higher.”
    “I’ll go for thirty-five.”
    “Turk, I think you should know that everybody in this gets a life-insurance policy made out to whoever he says. That is the kind of a man we are working for.”
    “I appreciate that.”
    “On the line.”
    “That is real courtesy.”
    “Ten-day term insurance for one hundred thousand dollars face value, and we pay the premiums.”
    “Junior, you seem to know so much, you must knowI got fifteen for the work in the State of Vera Cruz, and that was back-country stuff. This is right out there in front, and you know it.”
    “We are going to be spending upwards of four hundred thousand dollars just to put you at the end of a board so’s you can jump into history. That’s worth a lot, Turk.”
    Fletcher shoveled in the chili and chewed thoughtfully. He didn’t speak for almost ten minutes. When he finished bowl number one Casper called out to the waitress for two more.
    “Twenty-five thousand,” Fletcher said at last.
    “Twenty-two thousand, five hundred gross,” Casper snapped. “That is, including the twenty-five hundred for the shootin’ lessons.”
    “I guess that’ll be all right,” Fletcher said, “providin’ you pay it over on the mornin’ of the day.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Abso-abso- ab so-lutely,” Fletcher said. “There is one thing I am stickin’ to, Casper. If I don’t get my money on the morning of the day, I plain ain’t goin’ to work.”
    ***
    On the morning of the day, February 22, 1960, in a furnished room off Walnut Street, Turk Fletcher put on the Philadelphia policeman suit they had given him to wear. He packed the disassembled rifle, a civilian suit, a green-and-brown-striped bow tie, a heavy wrench and Western Stories in the boughten bag he had brought along from home. He locked the bag, then he snapped a padlock on the hasp he had welded to it. A man had to do his own independent thinking to stay in one piece with a crowd like this, he thought. He hadn’t liked the sound or the look of the Number One rifle from the time he had first set eyes on him at that fake-ass ranch in Arizona. The little basser was just a cheap gangster and some kind of a fairy fellow too.
    At seven thirty Casper knocked at the door and Fletcher let him in.
    “You are sure something to see in that suit,” Casper said. “There has always been something gentling about a policeman to me.”
    He gave Fletcher an envelope and they sat down at a round table to count it out. It was all there. They shook hands. “I know you are going to do a fine job,” Casper said.
    “I am going to do my best,” Fletcher replied, then Casper left.
    At ten minutes after eight, young Willie Arnold, the Number One rifle’s “assistant” (shee-yut), a blubber-lip who looked as if he couldn’t drive nails in a snow-bank, came to pick up the boughten bag and take it to Room 603 in the Engelson Building, where he would lock it in. They didn’t speak. Willie wasn’t his “assistant.” Willie just stayed out in the hall. He handed Fletcher the key to 603. Fletcher handed him the boughten bag. Willie went right back down the stairs. He sure looked boogered.
    Fletcher went back inside and folded the money into a money belt and put the belt on. He thought how, if anyone had ever told him when he was twenty-one years old that the day would come when he would be paid twenty-two thousand, five hundred dollars for a morning’s work, he just would have thought that person was crazy. He had very much in mind that they had agreed to pay him so handily because when the police came asmokin’ for him—as they all sure as hell had it all set up—they would find all that money on his poor dead body, and that would be sure evidence that he had been the man who had shot the President. He giggled softly to himself, purely enjoying the surprises that